Stranger Than History

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Suppose I told you that I knew for a fact that the following statements were true:

If you paint yourself a certain exact color between blue and green, it will reverse the force of gravity on you and cause you to fall upward.
In the future, the sky will be filled by billions of floating black spheres. Each sphere will be larger than all the zeppelins that have ever existed put together. If you offer a sphere money, it will lower a male prostitute out of the sky on a bungee cord.
Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to put thieves in jail instead of spanking them.

You’d think I was crazy, right?

Now suppose it were the year 1901, and you had to choose between believing those statements I have just offered, and believing statements like the following:

There is an absolute speed limit on how fast two objects can seem to be traveling relative to each other, which is exactly 670,616,629.2 miles per hour. If you hop on board a train going almost this fast and fire a gun out the window, the fundamental units of length change around, so it looks to you like the bullet is speeding ahead of you, but other people see something different. Oh, and time changes around too.
In the future, there will be a superconnected global network of billions of adding machines, each one of which has more power than all pre-1901 adding machines put together. One of the primary uses of this network will be to transport moving pictures of lesbian sex by pretending they are made out of numbers.
Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to say that someone should not be President of the United States because she is black.

Based on a comment of Robin Hanson’s: “I wonder if one could describe in enough detail a fictional story of an alternative reality, a reality that our ancestors could not distinguish from the truth, in order to make it very clear how surprising the truth turned out to be.”¹

¹Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/j0/making_history_available/ewg.

Suppose I told you that I knew for a fact that the following statements were true:

If you paint yourself a certain exact color between blue and green, it will reverse the force of gravity on you and cause you to fall upward.
In the future, the sky will be filled by billions of floating black spheres. Each sphere will be larger than all the zeppelins that have ever existed put together. If you offer a sphere money, it will lower a male prostitute out of the sky on a bungee cord.
Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to put thieves in jail instead of spanking them.

You’d think I was crazy, right?

Now suppose it were the year 1901, and you had to choose between believing those statements I have just offered, and believing statements like the following:

There is an absolute speed limit on how fast two objects can seem to be traveling relative to each other, which is exactly 670,616,629.2 miles per hour. If you hop on board a train going almost this fast and fire a gun out the window, the fundamental units of length change around, so it looks to you like the bullet is speeding ahead of you, but other people see something different. Oh, and time changes around too.
In the future, there will be a superconnected global network of billions of adding machines, each one of which has more power than all pre-1901 adding machines put together. One of the primary uses of this network will be to transport moving pictures of lesbian sex by pretending they are made out of numbers.
Your grandchildren will think it is not just foolish, but evil, to say that someone should not be President of the United States because she is black.

¹Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/j0/making_history_available/ewg.

Here is how this conversation played out:

you: "The economics of the left have been abandoned."

me: "What do you mean by 'economics of the left?"

you: "Nationalization, the government controlling the means of production, etc."

me: "What about Russia, China, etc?"

you: "Russia is actually not a true Scotsman, and I am going to apply the label 'capitalism' to China in such a way that it trumps the fact that a huge amount of economic capacity activity there is directly controlled by the state, many many firms are nationalized, or effectively nationalized, etc."

re: edit: 19th-20th century reforms are a very complicated subject, I don't think you can give a good analysis in one paragraph. Reforms in Russia went very differently from reforms in the Ottoman empire, which went very differently from reforms in Hapsburg Austria, and so on.

For example, Russia abolished the serfs because they noted that their army was pathetic during the Crimean war, and they wanted to have an army that is competitive with the West. And of course the process wasn't even complete until 1907, which is amazing if you think about it because it implies Russia was part-feudal into the 20th century.

One view on the current Crimean crisis is that Russia is still playing conceptual catchup with the West. When the West was living in the 19th century, Russia was living in the 16th. Now that the West is living in the 21st century, Russia is living in the 19th. At any rate, Russia's trajectory has very little in common with, for instance, England's trajectory. England started on the path of restricting the power of the King back during the Magna Carta days. Russia is still not fully on board with this being a good idea today, 8 centuries later.

You can't just talk about "labor reform [unqualified]."

Russia also had free market economics imposed on it in the nineties, in line with pretty much everyone seeing it as the only option. So much for relentless leftwardsness.

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